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"The Punnet", Delivering Juicy Content For Wimbledon Fans

Engaging with Wimbledon fans globally through social media listening

To give tennis fans across the world a supreme digital experience of The Championships, Wimbledon and IBM have worked together to capture data, gain insights and deliver real time content through a ’pop up’ team of marketers tasked with maximising the fans Social Media experience.

In 2014 The Wimbledon Championships had over 1 billion television views and 63 million visits to Wimbledon.com. From 1990 to 2014 over 46 million Wimbledon data points were recorded and used in analytics and match reports for players, coaches and of course, fans.

Those recorded data points provide information for the site and to broadcasters, allowing The All England Lawn Tennis Club to provide the best and most engaging, relevant and real-time content on Wimbledon.com. This year the IBM team are ensuring that the data points collected help deliver an experience that is “the next best thing” to being at SW19 across the Wimbledon digital channels.

As a result of this data availability, social media has become a huge platform for fan engagement for Wimbledon in 2015 and I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in this social media project.

Here are 3 ways we’ve been helping the team at Wimbledon this year on Social Media:

- In the lead up to the start of The Championships and over the past week, our “pop up” group of marketers, named “The Punnet”, have been using live social listening to see what is being said on social media about the digital experience IBM delivers for Wimbledon. We’ve two engaging apps and an interactive game, http://www.maketheteam.co.uk, available to Wimbledon fans and we’ve been responding to fans online queries and comments around the apps and the game.

- On site at Wimbledon and available at “The Punnet” HQ the Social Command Centre is tracking all social media activity around Wimbledon to capture the latest trends and topics of conversation online. The IBM Watson technology is being used to identify milestone competition moments, comparing the data from the day’s play with historical match statistics and then alerting users when there are fascinating match facts. Last week, despite the hot weather, Milos Raonic served the fastest serve of the competition so far, and the third ever fastest serve at Wimbledon, at 145mph. Wimbledon responded quickly on social media, and here in the Punnet we were able to amplify that message straight away. Rapid insights and quick content creation has been key to delivering the best experience for fans across the world on multiple digital platforms.

- The work IBM is doing with Wimbledon is also being amplified across a range of websites such as marketingweek.com and thetelegraph.co.uk. Via the “Punnet Team” there are subject matter experts engaging with influencers and customers on social media. By listening live to the social media conversations we’ve been able to respond quickly and point people in the direct of relevant content or ask subject matter experts to contact them directly.

There’s a great atmosphere here in the Punnet, discussing and debating topics and issues, working in an agile way and using an internal online community to document everything we have learnt. Plus we’ve see some great engagement in the content we are sharing.

You can check out all the data behind the match, play the game and get involved at #waystowin!

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Author Profile

Over the past 8 months I was working in the Big Data Marketing team at IBM Software Group, I was responsible for the UK social presence of the big data brand. I worked closely with both sales, technical and other marketing reams to source and create relevant and engaging content to share across our UK social sites. I interlocked with our US counterparts to ensure content can be shared to a much wider audience.
My new role is in communications, and my team and I looking for effective and engaging ways to send out content to all UK employees.

Skills

When it comes to communicating across social media sites, I am good at creating and using a relevant tone of voice for the audience. I am currently becoming much more effective at creating blog posts with my own content or re-purposed content from other people. I love blogging and photography outside of work too, which I feel has aided my social content skills in the workplace too!

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